Prayers for the Holy Roman Emperor figured in all Christian (Catholic) missals and, until recently, were recited on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The election of an emperor (who originally had to be crowned by the pope) became a feast all over western Christendom. In American Catholic missals these prayers appeared until World War II, when they were formally abolished by Pope Pius XII. Such prayers were also recited in Lutheran services, and in Prussia they were cancelled only upon the orders of Frederick II in the eighteenth century… He [the Emperor] was chosen by the electors, and before his coronation he had the title “King of the Romans.” (The seven, eight, or nine electors were powerful princes, secular or ecclesiastical.) After Frederick III (1440-1493) it became inconceivable that any other but a Habsburg could be elected… as successor of the Caesars, surrounded by the glory of universality: the Pope was the spiritual, the Holy Roman Emperor the temporal head of the world.

If we were slaves of our king and Emperor, subjected to him by your jurisdiction, it would not be permissible for us to separate ourselves from you [our duke]. Yet now, since we are free, and hold our king and Emperor the supreme defender of our liberty on earth, as soon as we desert him, we lose our liberty, which no good man, as it is said, loses save with his life. Since this is so, we are willing to obey whatever honorable and just requirement you make of us. If, however, you will something which is contrary to this, we shall return freely into that position whence we came under certain conditions to you.

This post is in part a response to a very recent article by the Modern Medievalist, whom I respect highly (and yet nonetheless disagree with in this case), and partly as a general response to the distortion of the concept of Sovereignty in Modern times. This has been brought to the forefront by the investigation of Holy See into the Religious Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. As the investigation is still on-going, it would be unwise to comment on specific situation of the Order today, so this post is mainly confined to the general principles involved.

After the death of Conradin, the grandson of the heretic Frederick II, the Empire was thrown into a lawless chaos now called the Interregnum. Men forsook the laws that had governed them and turned to robbery and violence, especially in the region of Southern Swabia (now Switzerland) near the High Rhine and the Aar. Below follows a proximate translation of the history of Count Rudolf IV von Hapsburg, taken from the Chronicon Helveticum (which in turn was taken from earlier sources such as the Chronik der Königsfelden ):

Nationalism is a threat to the International Good, a subversion of true Patriotism. Its fruits are self-evident; endless war, tyrannical Statism, the Annihilation of Nations, and violent Racism. Yet despite these plainly visible effects, we live today in a Nationalistic world. Without a comprehensive International System or indeed Worldview, Civilization will kill itself, and yet that is exactly what is happening. The question is not when will it happen, the question is why is it happening now? Continue reading →

In 1264, Pope Urban IV issued the Papal Bull Transiturus de Hoc Mundo, promulgating to the Latin Rite the Solemn Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, to be celebrated on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Around this same time, Rudolf the eighth Count of Hapsburg aided and protected a priest bringing the Viaticum to a dying farmer, giving the priest his horse and guiding him across a raging torrent, walking bareheaded. The priest then prophesied that the humble Count and his descendents would receive the Imperium of the Holy Roman Empire.

“The cross on the flag,” and here he pointed to the symbol which represented the United Nations, the governing body of a majority of the civilized world, a government with the power to control the earth, “has been twisted out of shape into a circle, the sign of a devouring self-absorption, and the laurel that surrounds it is the faded glory of this world-”- Tower of Ivory Chapter I-Coming Soon!

The conflict presented in The War for Christendom is not only a physical war, but an ideological conflict and in a sense a symbolic conflict. It is a war between two Crosses, and there is a world of difference between the two.

The first Cross is the Twisted Cross, the cross bent into a shape not its own, it is the divinization of the State as the supreme good, an absolute Statism. In The War for Christendom, this worship of the state is the philosophy of a future United Nations, what the present UN could become, for the dangerous tendency is present.

In contrast to this Statism is the old Holy Empire governed by the Reichsidee, the idea of an International Law based on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and the Common Good. The common man and the nation to which he belongs are protected by a Higher Authority, while he himself defends this Authority; truly symbolized by the Cross, for the Cross is made of two parts, each supporting the other, of Authority and Liberty each in its proper place; in a word, Freedom within the Law.

You know that I am born of the most Christian Emperors of the noble German nation, of the Catholic Kings of Spain, the Archdukes of Austria, the Dukes of Burgundy, who were all to the death true sons of the Roman Church, defenders of the Catholic Faith, of the sacred decrees and customs of its worship, who bequeathed all this to me as my heritage and according to whose example I have hitherto lived. Thus I am determined to hold fast…

For it is certain that a single monk must err if he stands against the opinion of all Christendom. Otherwise, Christendom itself would have erred for more than a thousand years. Therefore I am determined to set my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life- my soul upon it.

“More than any pope, more than any saint, [Charles V] saved Christendom-” The Man Who Saved Christendom, Dr. Warren Carroll (available here)